It’s funny to be writing this on a typewriter; but truly, I think there is a great deal to be said for the slogan “be different.” Pope Francis infamously told a World Youth Day audience to “make a mess,” and that is exactly what I’ve been doing with this typewriter for the past thirty minutes.

Spurred on by an editorial in the latest issue of The European Conservative, I have been marveling at the paradox we have arrived at: the new “normal” of the untethered radical Left is the result of their being different. What is now truly different is the old way of doing things; rebellion has become a rather drab and uniform affair of everyone being “different” in essentially the same rainbow way—all the while professing their diversity.
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Pouring oil into oil doesn’t make a dressing; but pouring vinegar into oil does; and pouring vinegar into baking soda makes an explosion. Perhaps more lessons could be learned from exploring the condiments on our shelves, but for the time being let’s explore the contents of ourselves instead.

Have we become sufficiently different (in the modern sense) that we are much too similar to everyone else? Are we allowing the drab (even when rainbow) relativism of our postmodern, consumerist America to catch up with us?
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I fear most of us are becoming homogenized fat. Symptoms include:

Forgetting what natural fruit juice tastes like
Reaching for our phone within the first few minutes of waking up
Only quoting movies, not books
Forgetting that fried chicken nuggets were once live animals
Forgetting that the current pontiff is a controversial figure
Not thinking of “having kids” and “having sex” as two sides of the same coin
Not knowing what the word esoteric means
Thinking of walking to work as inconvenient
Not batting an eye when you realize work is so far away that you can’t walk to work
Putting prayer off for tomorrow…or better yet, the weekend